Sunday, October 02, 2011

NCLB: Strange Bedfellows Sprung from Opting Out

The 2010 state elections in South Carolina struck a disturbing blow against progressive and critical supporters of public education with the election of a governor, Nikki Haley, who strongly supports school choice, and a superintendent of education, Mick Zais, without experience in public education and who endorses vouchers, expanding charter schools, teacher accountability linked to merit pay and student test scores, and reducing government spending as a matter of policy.

NCLB as powerful but misguided federal policy superimposed on the traditional responsibility of the states in public education has created misery for progressive and critical educators who reject bureaucratic and corporate templates for public education as well as libertarian-leaning conservatives who seek to reduce federal government as a de facto Big Brother menace in all public and private matters.

So should progressive and critical educators support education policies also endorsed by advocates with whom we disagree? In short, should progressive and critical educators encourage their states to opt out of NCLB (or reject the funding offered under Race to the Top [RttT]) even if the political machine in that state has motives unlike our own?

First, the short answer is yes.

Over the past three decades, the high-stakes accountability and testing movement has produced the exact same discourse politicians have been shouting for over 150 years—education is in crisis and we must reform our schools.

But the ever-increasing faith in tests, standards, and accountability has ironically produced a growing body of research that proves these policies are failures. [1]

Next, however, progressive and critical challenges to the accountability movement must build on the weight of evidence by unmasking the corporate intent of partisan politics—which aren't evidence of inherent flaws in government or social policies.

The Obama administration is continuing what was misguided in the education policies under George W. Bush—using federal policies and funding to coerce states into implementing corporate policy. As Adam Bessie has warned about NCLB wavers: “NCLB has not been revamped, but rather, rebranded.” For example, RttT is political blackmail just as the Reading First scandal [2] was eventually exposed to be.

Yes, NCLB should be dismantled and the role of the federal government in public education must be reconsidered, but not for the reasons many libertarians/conservatives claim.

While we have been forced into what appears to be an allegiance with strange bedfellows, we must reject NCLB, RttT, and other failed bureaucratic approaches to education reform while also clarifying why; for example, holding up to reformers all along the political spectrum more evidence from a favorite of politicians and the media, Finland.

• There is very little emphasis in Finland on standardized tests or data-based comparisons of any sort. ("Americans like all these bars and colored graphs," one Finnish educator says bemusedly.) • Finnish teachers, who are selected from the top 10 percent of the nation's college graduates, command a level of professional respect comparable to that of doctors and lawyers. (And the required master's degree in theory and practice is fully subsidized by the government.)
• All public schools in Finland follow a national curriculum that has been boiled down to "broad guidelines." ("The national math goals for grades one through nine," the author notes, have been "reduced to a neat ten pages.")
• Mixed-ability student groupings are the norm (indeed, apparently required), with special educators playing a large and valued role in helping struggling students stay on pace.
• There is a major emphasis, including among differing political parties, on equality of resources and access across schools.

The successful policies of schools in Finland refute every aspect of the accountability movement currently being expanded in the U.S.

But this is not the full picture, since even this evidence evades once again a powerful fact distinguishing Finland and the U.S., childhood poverty rates (3-4% in Finland, over 20% in the U.S.). [3]

In the each state in the U.S. and in every nation of the world, educational outcomes are reflections of social realities and not proof that schools alone can produce a new social order.

Progressive and critical educators who seek the promise of universal public education that we have never fulfilled are standing at a pivotal point in the history of school reform, faced with outcome allegiances with strange bedfellows and a complex challenge to communicate the intent of those allegiances to a public misled by the political elite and the careless media daily.

"Educators who seek fundamental reform, therefore, should dedicate themselves to critical-historical analysis and comprehensive social change. To succeed, we will have to join forces with those seeking social justice, democratic voice, and new forms of community, institutional, and economic life. As Counts (1932) expressed it so well so long ago, it is finally time we dared to build a new social order."

Stedman, L. C. (2010). How well does the standards movement measure up? An
analysis of achievement trends and student learning, changes in curriculum and school culture,
and the impact of No Child Left Behind. Critical Education, 1(10). Retrieved 2 October 2011 fromhttp://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/...

Stedman, L. C. (2011). Why the standards movement failed. An educational and
political diagnosis of its failure and the implications for school reform. Critical Education, 2(1).
Retrieved 2 October 2011 from http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/...

“One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers